How Gerrymandering Reform Could Change America (for the Better)

One of the scariest metaphors that is oftentimes used about a bad situation is about the frog in the boiling water.  While scientifically unsound (also, you shouldn't torture frogs in such a way), essentially the idea behind it is that a frog will immediately jump out of a kettle of boiling water, but if you are gradual enough while the frog is in room temperature water, you can boil it alive because it won't notice it's slowly being killed.  Something about this conversation seems to be hitting me lately when it comes to discussions about the census, HR-1, and gerrymandering, and I wanted to devote a conversation to this topic.

One of the more frustrating things about the HR-1 conversations has been that most people have focused on it in conjunction with the recent litany of anti-democratic bills put forward in states like Georgia & Florida, which make it harder to vote by mail & limits how long people can vote early & even barbarically states that you can't give someone in a long line a glass of water.  This is all ridiculous & a problem-I'm not saying it's not-but it's sort of skewered that HR-1's most important factor is gerrymandering reform.  It's so much more important than anything else that it would be worth just passing this bill and ignoring the rest if that's what it takes to convince Manchin/Sinema to get onboard.  It's a bigger opportunity than literally anything else Biden would do.  Literally any sentence you say, the passage of gerrymandering reform that's in this bill, that would move federal gerrymandering completely out of the control of state legislatures and into the power of nonpartisan commissions, is underselling what a big fucking deal this is.  It would be the single most important thing that Joe Biden signed into law during his presidency, including the Covid relief bill.  It could well be the single most important elections law in the last half century.  That progressives & Democrats aren't only talking about this reform is a sign that they don't understand just how gerrymandered our nation is, and how disproportionately it skewers to the Republicans...to the point where it might soon be the case where the Democrats simply can't win the House without this bill passed, and with the chips already stacked against them in the Senate & electoral college, that they aren't putting all of their chips into one basket to me is maddening.

So I'm going to try illustrate it through a few examples.  The first is talking about Utah.  Utah is a red state-it went for Donald Trump by 20-points, and has only Republicans elected statewide; Republicans also have complete control of the state legislatures.  Utah is not the most obvious contender for the Democrats when it comes to House seats, and they don't currently hold any seats in the state.  But Utah, which has four congressional seats, gave Joe Biden 37% of the vote in 2020.  Why, exactly, is it that Utah has over a third of its state voting for Democrats, but they don't send a Democratic House member to Congress?

It is not, like in some states, because of the Democrats being spread out across the state (this is kind of the case in a place like Connecticut, which has five Democrats in the House but it's honestly difficult to draw a district that the Republicans could hold consistently without proportional gerrymandering to make it happen because the Republicans are too spread out).  Most of Biden's supporters live in the Salt Lake City metro region, and according to Dave's Redistricting (an invaluable resource I used for much of this article), it's pretty easy to draw a Democratic district (likely a marginal one, but one that should be favorable to Democrats certainly if Biden is winning 37%) without any gerrymandering.  The problem is, though, that the Utah Republicans have drawn a map that has essentially taken the Salt Lake County voters and split them into fourths, with the metro area parceled up into all four districts (rather than just one), watering down the Democratic support.

This is gerrymandering, but it's also, essentially a dictatorship.  The Utah Democratic voters has no power to change this process, and the one thing they do have (central location) is stolen from them by the system.  We don't think of this as "not democracy" because A) people are still technically voting and B) it's been around for 200 years.  But it's essentially taking the voters & totally disregarding them by letting politicians pick & choose who they want to represent.  It's not that different than what you see in a place like Russia, where they go through the motions of an election but there's no way for the minority to ever actually win.

Gerrymandering affects both sides of the aisle (look at maps in Illinois & Maryland for reference), but if you look at gerrymandering driven by breaking up common geographies, it's done disproportionately to disadvantage Democrats than Republicans.  Republicans, for example, likely deserve to have at least 6-8 more seats in California if you go solely on the 2020 presidential results.  Biden got 63% of the vote, but Democrats have 79% of the seats.  However, if you look at logical maps of the area, this is driven by Republicans cohabiting with Democrats in larger metropolitan areas but clearly being outnumbered.  LA County has over 1 million Republicans who voted for Donald Trump...they just also have 3 million Democrats, making anything short of a completely proportional map difficult for the Republicans to get their support.

(Quick Sidebar-this is an idea that has been put forward by Fordham University, where essentially you vote for the party first, then the person, a system that would upend US politics but make even unintentional gerrymandering impossible.  How it would work is essentially you'd vote for Republican or Democrat-control in a primary-which seat do you want to represent you in the House or the State legislature-and then based on how the state voted, that's how many seats you'd get.  If 40% of the state voted for the Republicans and they have 5 House seats, the Republicans would get 2 seats, and they'd be drawn based on the population of the Republican voters in the primary.  This way if you live in a place like LA County, you still get to have your vote matter.  Afterward, they'd redraw the congressional lines based on partisan politics (i.e. the state would be drawn into two Republican districts based on results and three Democratic), and then you'd have candidates in those districts run, and you'd vote for only the candidates in the party you initially voted for.  This way it's completely proportional and it doesn't take away the geographic connection you have with legislators.  It's an awesome idea that would require us completely upending American politics...but we should honestly have this conversation because it's the closest we might ever get to truly representative democracy in a partisan, two-party system.  End of Sidebar).

The LA County example is a good one for the Republicans, but it's also a reminder that this isn't necessarily a problem that Democrats should encounter.  Democrats tend to be more centrally-located than Republicans are because they're the majority in major urban centers.  The reason that Democrats are frequently under-represented are not because they're spread out-it's because they're parceled out.  The Salt Lake City example is just one example, but there's many.  Birmingham, Little Rock, St. Louis, Cleveland, Toledo, Columbus, Cincinnati, Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio, and Orlando are all essentially divvied up & watered down in order to elect more Republicans.  It is near certain that this will continue, most probably in Nashville, Atlanta, Kansas City, & Louisville into the next Congress, unless HR-1 passes.

This is out of control, and it's a broken system.  This is not an LA County situation-it's a deliberate disenfranchisement of major metropolitan voters (frequently, it's worth noting, African-American voters) and a way for Republicans to hold a disproportionate amount of power by diluting voters' power through breaking up obvious geographic boundaries.  It's been going on so long that we don't realize how bad it is, but look at that list of metropolitan areas-how can you think that's right?

And this is why the gerrymandering reform is so crucial-because it would fix this.  Gerrymandering reform would not make it so that the Republicans or the Democrats have a permanent control of the House (which shouldn't be the point), but it would ensure that the voters get a fair shake.  And it would profoundly change the way that American politics would run.  For starters, we'd have considerably more competitive districts (moderating political discourse).  We'd have at least 12-15 more Democratic seats than we currently have, and roughly 6-8 more Republican seats than we currently have (for a net gain of about 4-9 more Democratic seats, which feels about right considering the current national gerrymandering).  4-9 more seats is not something the Republicans cannot overcome in a tough election, but it'd also mean that gerrymandering (which likely cost the Democrats a majority in at least 2012, and definitely cost them a more robust majority in the current Congress) isn't the reason a party holds power-it's because the people do.  Because, and I cannot stress this enough-that 4-9 seats that the Democrats are being cheated out of due gerrymandering could easily double if we don't pass HR-1.  And it's not going to be possible except in the biggest of Democratic waves for the party to be able to overcome a handicap of starting 10-15 seats further behind than they should be.

So, yes, voting reforms are important.  As are a number of progressive reforms.  But if you care about democracy, and profoundly making a once-in-a-century change to make politics in this country more equitable, the ONLY thing that matters is getting gerrymandering reform through Congress...call your senators, and make sure they know we want it, and we want it for 2022's maps.